High Beam Steering in Fabry–Pérot Leaky-Wave Antennas

A high-gain low-profile Fabry-Perot (FP) leaky-wave antenna (LWA) presenting one-dimensional high beam steering properties is proposed in this letter. The structure consists of a ground plane and a varying inductive partially reflective surface (PRS). A microstrip patch antenna is embedded into the cavity to act as the primary feed. As design examples, antennas are designed to operate at 9.5 GHz. Subwavelength FP cavities with fixed overall thickness of λ₀ /6 (where λ₀ is the free-space operating wavelength) are fabricated and measured. The impact of varying the PRS inductance is analyzed. It is shown that a high beam steering angle from broadside toward endfire direction close to 60 can be obtained when judiciously designing the inductive grid of the PRS.